Simbellmyne's utopia

It feels kind of weird to come back to tumbrl with such a post, but I’ve always marked historical occasions here. And I must mark this.

These are train cars for transporting cattle. 70 years ago they took tens of thousands of people to be starved and worked to death in Siberia. My grandmother’s family escaped them - they were warned that they were in the deportation lists and fled across the country. My friend’s great uncle wasn’t in the lists - he and his son were taken from the middle of the street because the soldiers had a quota to fill. My grandfather had a half-brother - a boy who was raised in his family, because his own was taken. Almost everyone here can tell similar stories.

Those deported were the most dangerous people for the Soviet system. Teachers. Writers. Priests. Artists. Officers and government clerks. Their families. Half of the people deported were children under 16. After the war ended even more people were exiled. This left countries, including mine, without their intellectual, cultural and moral elite. And the people that remained were left in fear. This left a mark on the national consciousness, a mark so strong, that even I, born decades after that and raised in a free world, still have a belief that a nation that hasn’t lived through a tragedy is somehow unfinished and incomplete. And alongside this belief there is also a deep-seated feeling of wrongness and anger that Stalin died in his bed with his sycophants kissing his hand, and did not receive a Nuremberg.